Ben Carson is quickly rising in the polls, even threatening Donald Trumps’s standing as frontrunner. While some on the Right may point to the meteoric rise of their favorite “Uncle Ruckus” as a sign that they are not racist in the least, the rest of us realize that Carson is exactly the sort of black man who would suggest slavery as a solution to a perceived problem. But an Iowa news reporter refused to allow Carson’s dangerously stupid rhetoric to fly in an interview that aired on Sunday.

WOI-DT reporter Sabrina Ahmed informed the 2016 presidential hopeful that his immigration plan that includes converting immigrants to a class of workers without rights equal to American workers sounds “eerily like indentured servitude.” In the interview, Carson, apparently considering Donald Trump’s “great big wall” to be amateur hour stuff, promised a double wall on the border, “then once the border is secure, you turn off the spigot that dispenses the goodies.”

“And you have to do that for all the borders, by the way, not just the southern border,” Carson explained, because he is worried about another group he doesn’t think deserves equal rights — Muslims. “Because I’m also concerned about global jihadists who want to come here. They are very dangerous people.”

The 11 million undocumented workers already in the country would not be deported if they “have a pristine record” and are “willing to engage as guest workers” in agricultural areas — workers without rights:

“They do not get voting rights and they do not become citizens unless the citizens of the United States want them to become citizens. I’ve talked to many farmers with very large farms, including some here in Iowa, who say they have great difficulty hiring Americans to do that job even though they start them out at $11 an hour.”

“Doesn’t that eerily sound like indentured servitude?” Ahmed asked, but Carson told her that no one is being forced into slavery — only if they want to stay in the United States.

“It sounds like you’re not forcing anybody to do anything,” Carson explained. “So, I don’t see how that would be indentured servitude. Nobody has to do it. They are perfectly welcome to leave.”

“But they wouldn’t have the same rights that if they were here as an American citizen?” Ahmed replied.

“No, they wouldn’t because they’re not here legally, so they’re not American citizens,” Carson told the reporter. “So, it would seem a little bit unfair to me that you give them the same privileges as American citizens when they’re here illegally.”

“But, wouldn’t they be here legally if they were given the path that you’re talking about where they can come in and work on farms?” Ahmed pressed, though Carson disagreed that his legal guest worker program would mean they would be here legally.

“See, you’re talking a slippery slope there,” Uncle Ruckus responded. “If you give them an inch, they’ll want to take a mile. No, we only give them an inch, we don’t give them a mile.”

Asked where he would draw the line, he said he would draw it “right there,” with human beings being treated as fourth-class citizens toiling in the fields without any rights to speak of. Carson’s immigration plan would take America back to a shameful time in its history that should be very personal to Carson. Unfortunately, as he serves the side that works to keep voting rights, marriage rights, and other liberties out of reach from anyone who is not a white, Christian male, slavery is just as good as realizing that undocumented workers are, above all else, human beings with rights — and, hey, it saves billions of dollars over Trump’s plan to just round up Hispanic people, pack them into overcrowded buses, and dump them in the middle of Mexico.

“We’d like to take care of everybody else, it would be wonderful if we could,” Carson said. “But it’s sort of like being in a lifeboat that has a capacity of 50 people and you look out and there’s 10 more. ‘Oh God, what are you going to do? Well, we’ll just take them on.’ Then everybody sinks and dies.”